Month: February 2015

Thought #1) In my favorite car service app (Uber) one of the best features is that when you order a car, it shows you a map and the car on the map as it weaves its way through the city to your location. There’s even an ETA.

Now, imagine that you had a similar app but for you and whoever else wants to know where you are. Lets call it : AlmostThere. You have a party or a dinner and your friends all link into the location and you get this map of all of them as they are heading to you. No longer do you wonder “where is Dave?”, “should we order? or wait?”, etc.

Thought #2) How many times did you want to show someone a photo from your phone but you are worried they may see something else on your phone or another photo in your gallery that you don’t want them to? There should be an app where you can set up a temporary viewing port on your friends phone and you can choose photos/videos to show them by just checking on them on your phone.

Thought #3) This one is pretty huge and it’s more an idea/vision than an app. So lets go back to Uber and think about how UberX works. UberX allows almost anyone with a car to be a taxi driver but on their own schedule. You sign up with Uber and they verify that your car is acceptable and that you have insurance, etc. and then whenever you want to work (say you have an evening or a free hour) you just sign in and it determines your location and assigns you a nearby fare to take somewhere. You drive the person and drop them off and Uber credits you some amount to your account and you either sign off or take another fare. It’s kind of a new way to think about labor. From your perspective you work when you want to work. From Ubers, they have a pool of people available that they manage. It’s up to them to incentivize drivers to log in and work (by varying fare prices, etc).

Now imagine that model extended out somewhat. Imagine the number of unskilled jobs that could be distributed in this way : delivery services (groceries, packages, pizza), simple clerical tasks, ticket takers at events, messenger jobs, farm laborer jobs, etc. Imagine that there is an app or an ecosystem of somekind where jobs are super temporary and the labor pool is flexible.

Lets take pizza delivery for example. There are 100 or so pizza places in Philadelphia. Maybe even more. All of them have at least one driver on staff and they have to manage that resource : what are their hours? taxes, insurance, etc. What if all the pizza shops were offered an uber like app where they just press a button and a driver shows up to deliver an order for them and they pay some variable fee for that service. The app can up the delivery charge for heavy volume days and lower the charge for slow days, etc. All the labor overhead is managed by the app (who gets to do it in aggregate).

I got it on my kindle and started reading it the other day and one chapter was really awesome.

Because he is amazing and believes in freedom, Corey Doctorow releases all of his books under Creative Commons so you can download them, excerpt them, change them, do whatever with them. You can find his books and stuff at his website.

So, instead of telling you about the chapter I’m able to just let you read it yourself. So click the link below to get the excerpt and see if you agree with me. And if you do, don’t be a cheapskate and buy the book. I just ordered the Hardcopy to put in my library!